During my many years as a rank and file representative of working people on the job (I put it this way as the influence of Unions in the workplace has declined so drastically, even in workplaces that have Unions, that many young workers have no idea what a shop steward is) I can’t recall how many times I had to sit across from the bosses and be told how this or that worker needed a lesson. “He needs to change his behavior” was a common refrain. “A week off will get the message across” management would tell me to justify their actions. A “week off” imposes considerable damage on a household’s finances but, people have to learn and “justice” has to be served---we have to be “realistic”.
When we are laid off or fired. When we are forced by the bosses and coerced by our Union leaders to accept reductions in our wages and benefits, our standard of living in general, we are told that we have to be realistic-----the market has spoken. During our strike in 1985, there was the underlying threat that we were endangering people’s lives as the commodity we worked to produce was fresh water and that curbing the production of this necessity was a fire and health threat.
Realistic depends on which side of the class divide you’re on. There is no such realism when it comes to the owner of capital, the buyer of Labor power rather than the seller of it. These capitalists are on strike and have been so for over a year. Their strike has caused untold deaths around the globe, increased the misery of the living, and here in the US thrown millions of their so called “national” kin, out of their homes and in to the streets.
Their politicians are a little more vulnerable to the public pressure that results from all of this than the real rulers of society and are trying to get them to put capital to work. A major obstacle, as many of us are aware, is the trillions of dollars in bad deals they made during the sumptuous feast they had over the last few years. These bad deals are what they call “toxic assets”, mortgage debt that struggling workers have been unable to pay.
The unelected rulers of the world have been debating how to deal with these massive underperforming assets. They are resisting a total nationalization of the banks and last week, Timothy Geitner, the US Treasury Secretary dragged out a new plan that they hope will get the capitalists to play the market game.
It’s a great deal for them and makes the quite happy. In their more serious journals, they are very clear about what is happening. The Geitner plan has “the right mix of incentives to ramp up the program” writes Business Week. These incentives include pricing these bad loans at such an attractive level that investors will buy them. Not only that, there will be what is mistakenly called a “public-private partnership” that we are told will combine public and investor funds that will be used to buy up these bad bets so the investors will play the game again and the banks can lend. I sort of see it like a huge cess pool full of human waste and they are asking us to dive in first and clean it up, then they can go swimming.
But what is this public/private partnership? The capitalist politicians will borrow money that workers will be forced to pay back. Then they will lend that money to this phony partnership at, “below market rates” so that the partnership can then buy up the toxic assets and the investors, seeing risk levels decline, will invest and the banks can lend again. The plan will also limit investor’s potential losses by having the taxpayer back them up. Socializing risk, privatizing gain.
The capitalists, the ones that caused the problem we are in, have to be “coaxed” have to have “incentives” in order to inject what they mistakenly refer to as “their” money in to the economy.
In order to passively accept wage and benefit reductions, the incentives being offered to workers by employers and Union officials are layoffs. The incentive to homeowners to not resist foreclosure and loss of their shelter is jail time. The police are the ever present incentive, the coaxing element.
Economic state terror is the incentive we get.
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